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Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Quilting Her Majesty

I've been hand quilting Her Majesty's Stamp Collection off and on for a while. I traced the main contours of the portrait that appears on the Machin series of British stamps in EQ6, printed it out and taped it together (twice, actually—measure first, dumbo), transferred it to the quilt top, basted, and finally curled up to start quilting. It's been going in fits and starts because, though I love quilting by hand, the tiny circles in her necklace and crown make me strop, and because I didn't initially trace the crown detail very well, so I'm having to make it up as I go. But the crown is all that remains to be done, along with the 1 from the "£1" in the corner (also traced from the stamp).

All that remains, that is, of the portrait itself. The background still has to be quilted somehow. It's a little hard to make the quilted face out, as you can tell from the photo—I'm OK with the subtlety, but I do want to make the texture stand out a little more. The original plan was to just quilt a quarter-inch inside each of the pieced squares that fall outside the portrait, but I'm wondering if echo quilting around the portrait itself, all the way out to the border, is a better plan. Any thoughts?

Oh, and the Other will give me a slap if I don't mention that using the portrait as the quilting design was his idea. Thanks Other!

1 comment:

One idea you might consider is doing an all-over diagonal grid outside the quilting lines of the portrait. That would make the curved lines of the portrait stand out. The grid lines can be single, double, or even triple depending on how much quilting you want to do.

The trouble with echo quilting is that the lines gradually lose the original shape as you get farther from the center.

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